Class and climate change in post-reform India

Journal article, 2024

Debates on emissions and climate change are dominated by inter-country inequalities, usually ignoring within-country inequalities. In this paper, we address the question of carbon space sharing in India across different classes after economic reforms were introduced in 1991. We establish using household consumption surveys that the elites in India are major polluters both in an absolute sense as well as in per capita terms. We find that inter-class component of emissions now explains 28.5% of total inequality compared to a mere 2.5% in 1994 at the onset of market-oriented reforms.